Likewise at tiny RBM Lumber, where the Thompson family makes
specialty board cuts just up the road from Plum Creek's plants.

The mills, it would seem, have much in common. But when the
world got big and scary, the two outfits took very different paths
to survival.

Plum Creek got bigger just like the world it lived in, evolving
to meet the market on its terms. RBM, however, retreated into a
smaller niche of safety, divorcing itself from commodity swings and
that volatile food chain of international supply and demand.

Those responses fueled a field trip Monday, part of a University
of Montana curriculum to bring students into rural Montana,
learning about how to bridge the gulf between landscape and
livelihood.

Coordinated by a Swan Valley organization called Northwest
Connections, the field trip set out to follow trees from the forest
to the mill, exploring along the way the forces that drive what has
traditionally been one of the state's largest moneymakers.

At the top of his lungs, over the roar of industry, Frosty Buck
explained the high-tech computer scanner in Plum Creek's plywood
plant, how it "sees" flaws in the wood better than the humans who
used to do the job.

"The one thing about this," he said of his machine, "is it
doesn't get tired."

It is, in fact, one of many computers in the largely automated
plant, where mechanics seem more common than millworkers. This,
Buck said, is how Plum Creek survives.

Most years, he said, the company invests an average of about $6
million in technology, most of it computerized. This year, it'll
spend $11 million to stay competitive.

"That's probably where we've gained the most," Buck said, "is in
the efficiency of the machines."

All that technology does several things for Plum Creek. It helps
the company use more of the log. It helps reduce waste and
inefficiency. It improves quality as well as quantity, with
production up some 10 percent, Buck said, in just 10 years.

But bigger production has not translated into bigger employment.
The company's labor force, he said, is at a steady-state zero
growth. More wood product goes out, but no new jobs make that
happen.

In North America, lumber production increased 16 percent in the
latter half of the 1990s, while during the same time 150 mills
closed.

That, he said, is a fact of life in a world where labor eats the
lion's share of your bottom line and safety insurance on a worker
can far exceed his paycheck.

Compare that reality, he said, to Plum Creek's international
competitors. In South America, for instance, "they'll work for a
dollar a day," and trees are nearly free for the picking.

Plum Creek is a big outfit, Buck said, with 8.4 million acres in
21 states, and 1,800 employees in the Flathead Valley alone. Entry
pay is about $13 plus benefits, he said, and without the automation
the budget just won't balance, the payroll wouldn't roll.

The company, in fact, is not a lumber company at all anymore,
but rather is classified as a real estate investment trust. Not a
few dollars are made transferring forests into residential spreads,
and Buck said wood-products manufacturing now supplies less than 10
percent of annual revenue.

It is, like the automation, a response to the global
marketplace, as is the change in what sort of wood is produced. The
world is awash in plywood - from both home and abroad - and to
compete, Buck said, Plum Creek has tried to wedge its big corporate
structure into a narrow niche market.

His plant makes high-end industrial-grade plywood, the kind used
in RVs and boats and semitrailers. The shift from regular plywood
sheeting, he said, has helped insulate Plum Creek from the vagaries
of the standard building material market.

(Although the world remains a player, with China gobbling up
some of the raw materials much needed in Buck's plant. And earlier
this year, a short-term supply glut caused "several days of
unplanned downtime" at another Plum Creek plant.)

In Buck's new world, the plywood is sold before it's made, and
prices are locked down long before boards hit the shelves.

"It works," he said. "Anytime you can capture a niche market
you're going to do much better for yourself."

That, in fact, is exactly the philosophy at RBM Lumber, where
niche has been taken to the extreme.

Standing in a brightly lit room, tall, wide and dusty, Ben
Thompson looks across racks upon racks of lumber at his family mill
and figures there must be more than 7,000 different products on the
walls.

"Yep," he said in a slow and careful voice, "lots and lots of
specialty order and odd sizes. We specialize in making what you
can't get in other places. If you can go down and pick it up at
Home Depot, then we tend not to make it."

Instead, RBM mills wood for paneling and flooring and doors and
countertops and tables and furniture and crazy specialty pieces
only a true artist could appreciate.

The company works in big wood - old-growth boles in excess of 3
feet across - but doesn't actively log old growth forests. They get
logs too big from Plum Creek, get the wind-thrown or burned or bug
infested dead and dying.

And, like a Plains Indian with a freshly killed buffalo, they
use every bit of it.

A length of tongue-and-groove flooring with a knotty spot
becomes two shorter lengths, and the bad piece is milled into
something else. Rotten lodgepole pine becomes a picture frame,
scraps become income.

"There's hundreds and hundreds of possibilities," Thompson said.
That diversity - combined with specialty - keeps RBM at arm's
length from global commodity markets, because none of these cuts
are considered commodities.

"We pick the stuff that's really unique," Thompson said, "and we
make something out of it."

Might take a week. Might take a month. Might take two years, but
they make something out of it. Some of the inventory is here
because people want it. Some is here because they had to do
something with the scraps.

"To us, waste is almost a moral issue," said partner and brother
Roy Thompson.

The family employs about two dozen, and produces perhaps 2
million board feet of products each year. At a more traditional
mill, Ben said, two dozen people might produce 50 million board
feet.

Of course, all of this takes time, and time is money, and money
could buy automation.

"But your $2 million scanner cannot do what your brain can do,"
Roy said. "We invest in our people, not in machines."

"Most people try to eliminate labor for more profit," Ben said.
"But that's why we're here - to make a living. Instead of trying to
eliminate as many jobs as possible, we want to create as many jobs
as possible."

It's a nice philosophy, but even he concedes it probably
wouldn't work so well in the cutthroat world of dimensional lumber
sold on a global market. The business model is just too
"complicated," Roy said, to apply as a workable model for the
industry.

What would work on a bigger scale, however, is the idea of niche
products and efficiencies that utilize the whole buffalo, both of
which Plum Creek is now exploring.

"If you have the time and the patience," Roy said, "you can make
money at it."

Mills that focus on volume and quantity go out of business, he
said. Those that focus on quality and specialty remain afloat -
even when prices plummet on commodity lumber and energy costs soar
and wildfires cut off woods work and environmental laws slow the
cut.

Even when the Pacific Rim stops buying boards.

"You can make it," Roy said, "but not if you keep doing it the
way your grandpa did. You have to be willing to change."

Back at Plum Creek, Frosty Buck stands next to an automated
conveyor and shouts over the din of that change.

"We've made lots of investment," he said, "lots of high-tech. I
think we're in a very strong position to compete worldwide."